For some 18 years now, my Rosemary and I have enjoyed a
daily breakfast in bed. We have a nice wicker tray we purchased at Eaton’s. Our
breakfast fare is different but now 18 years later we have a couple of little
dishes with our countless pills that reflect that we are old.

But the pleasure of reading our newspapers is the high point
of the day. We have subscriptions to the NY Times and the Vancouver Sun. The
protocol is that she starts with the NY Times while I immediately go to Rex
Morgan in my Vancouver Sun.

Saturday is the day with the thinnest NY Times and the
thickest Vancouver Sun. The NY Times compensates with the fact that we get the
heavy Sunday edition on Saturday night. The usual conundrum, “Do we start it on
Saturday night (in bed) or leave it to Sunday?”

Today it became patently obvious that our Vancouver Sun
is steadily moving in the direction of irrelevancy. At 9AM there was no paper
on the doorstep. Rosemary and I shared the thin NY Times. She started the first
section with the scrumptious editorials, and me with the business and arts
sections.

By the time I got to the editorial I found this fabulously
illustrated essay on the Trump tie. Strangely the on-line version does not
reproduce it and opts for a photograph of Trump with his trademark long red
tie. The essay itself is a sartorial delight.

As my life fades into the irrelevancy of old age, I wonder
who is going to go first?Will it be me
or my Vancouver Sun?

The events in our neighbour to the South break my heart but
I have resolved not to rant or complain particularly in social media. Such is
the volume of the rants and concerns by my Facebook friends that my friend John
Lekich refuses to read anything about them stating that it makes him forget
that he is a Canadian and that he is living in Canada. Social media blurs those
borders.

I was particularly moved by my friend Allan Morgan whom I
call my Prospero (a role he played so well) who posted a photograph of
Rosemary Brown with the rallying cry (about Senator Elizabeth Warren made to
shut up by the McConnel) that is barely two days old, “nevertheless she
persisted”

Here is my photograph of Rosemary Brown which I took
sometime in the 80s in a series for Women of Distinction.

Sarah Rodgers & Allan Morgan

The other photograph, one of my faves ever (a Polaroid
peel scan), is of Allan Morgan and Sarah Rodgers in their roles in Angels in
America.

The pathos in their faces is heart wrenching. I reused the photograph for this blog about Allan Morgan's role as Prospero in Bard on the Beach's The Tempest.

When it became February 1982 I made sure that this time I
was not going to forget an important date. I reserved a room at the Granville
Island Hotel and stipulated that I had to find a bottle of Champagne in the
hotel room after we checked in. I made sure we had a good baby sitter to take
care of our two daughters. I drove my wife Rosemary on February the 8th
from our Burnaby home to the movies downtown. We were going to see An Officer
and a Gentleman with Richard Gere and Debra Winger.

After this most romantic film we checked into the hotel. By
now Rosemary had not doubt that I had not forgotten our wedding anniversary. The bottle of Champagne was there in its bucket.

I must state here that we did not get a good night’s sleep.
And it’s not what you think. We were unaware that good hotels had in suite
refrigerators. This one made ice all night. The clunking was terrible.

Today January 12, 2017 I had to ask Rosemary when our
anniversary is. Shame on me! Perhaps I can think of something as we celebrate
our 49th wedding anniversary which is today February 8, 2017

In 1958 I bought my second camera, a very good one for
the time. It was a single lens reflex Pentacon-F when people were still arguing
of the advantage of an SLR over the more common rangefinder cameras.

The paradox about being a photographer is that we (or at
least this one) is conservative and likes stuff to stay the same while being
excited about new stuff and experimenting with it. A photographer who does not do personal stuff, is dead in the water.

I taught high school in Mexico until 1975 when my
Canadian wife told me (she was an early feminist) that all of us including our
two Mexican-born daughters were moving to Vancouver.

By 1977 I was shooting for several magazines including Vancouver Magazine and several business magazines.It was at Vancouver Magazine where I met up with two art
directors, Richard Staehling and Chris Dahl who forced me to push my
boundaries. They asked me do photographs with some effect they had seen in art
magazines.

For those reading this now is when I want to press the
point that the advent of photography had a small audience as these photographs
(ambrotypes, Daguerreotypes, Talbot Types, etc could not be reproduced in the
newspapers of the 19th century until the late 1870s when the half-tone process
was invented. The previous method, the photogravure, while beautiful was much too
expensive for everyday use.

What this means really is that the newspapers by the end
of the 19th century and the magazines of the 20th had the money to compete for
excellence and they all vied for originality. These publications wanted unique
images. It was not uncommon to send photographers to circle the globe to shoot
and to be paid royal wages. It was Bert Stern who in the 1950s convinced
Smirnoff that Americans would only believe that a dry vodka martini was dry if
it was photographed by the Egyptian pyramids. The company paid for all the
hangers on, the plush hotels, the drugs and the booze. It was Stern who became
the poster man that proclaimed the free-lance photographers got rich, could get
boys and women of their choice plus all the drugs.

This excellence in magazine competition just about ended
by the end of th 20th century with the advent of the internet.

Why pay Stern to send him to the pyramids when they could
be Photoshopped in a studio shot?

In my view the Holy Grail of photography has always been
the readily identifiable style of the photographer. You know it’s a Penn, an
Avedon, a Leibovitz, Newton, Stern, Eugene Smith, Burke-White, etc when you see
their images.

I believe that if Cartier-Bresson where to come to
Vancouver (if he happened to be alive) he would be on employment insurance
within a month. His photography and that of, as an example Robert Frank’s The
Americans were fabulous precursors of the street photography we see today. Now
it is just about impossible to note the style of the modern street shooters.
One wonderful exception was Mary Ellen Mark. Her photograph of couple of
teenagers with a gun taken with an extreme wide angle, really close has the
impact of a photographer who did not sneak to take her pictures and was fearless.

Thus the 21st century as it is now is a difficult time
for the photographer. Someone with insight may have to push forward with some
unheard (now) style and method) in this era of fake news where we look at
pictures and do not believe their apparent authenticity. I notice that few photographers use lighting except the one made available by nature. Shooting rock concerts is another situation where the photographer is powerless in injecting style. Camera ads parade the idea that with a Nikon or Canon wonder in your hand you can do everything and anything.

For me the breakthrough came in two paths. One path was
to choose to shoot in a studio or on location with a big light. I rapidly
graduated from umbrellas to softboxes, to Hollywood spotlights, grid spots,
ring flashe and beauty dishes. The light that made it all possible was the
venerable Norman 200-B.

The second path was to buy a Mamiya RB-67 around 1979
when most photographers who shot medium format went for the more expensive
Hasselblads. What they did not understand (and the art directors I worked for
did) was that the 6x7 cm format (the camera back can be flipped for vertical or
horizontal shots) worked well for magazine covers, full bleed vertical pages
and two-page spreads with copy on part of one page.’

My photographs were never cropped by art directors (I
shot everything vertical and horizontal, just in case). Hasselblad shooters
with their square format may have made money with album covers!

Another, and to me a more important path to success was
to research my subjects before I photographed them. The idea when you have just
a few minutes to photograph someone is to shoot three or four useable shots
taken perhaps in seconds after spending more time connecting verbally.

I share with Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luís Borges
the idea that soaking in a hot bathroom tub is the place to come up with
concepts. The same goes for middle-of-the-night insomnia. They provide ripe
time for innovation and imagination.

And lastly photography for magazines is like fishing. You
can never talk (and get away) with pointing out the large fish that got away.
When folks asked me for a formula of success for people magazine photography I
always wrote this:

1. Make your appointment with your subject politely and
without insult.

2. Show up on time. This precludes going on a previous
day to explore the area you will be shooting in.

3. Take two of everything. Failure of equipment is not to
be tolerated. I have always had backup in a very good support staff.

4. Give the art director one useable image – one that did
not get away.

Number 4 and number 3 were dependant on the fact that in
the magazine and newspaper era before scanners, original photographs had to be
taken with colour slides or larger transparencies. Slides always had poor
allowance for exposure error (it is called film latitude). There was one
advantage, the art director was always looking at an original without the
possibility (rare) of any photographer manipulating its veracity of color, etc.
Now images look different on different monitors. Digital in many respects has
made it more difficult to determine the photographer’s intention.

I hope that the above serves well to those reading it. I
will place below links that may enlarge on the topics I mentioned above.